Monitoring external ftp uploads with PHP

Question

Okay, here's the rundown.

I'm developing a video hosting site with PHP and jQuery primarily. My client is absolutely set on using Filezilla to upload his videos via FTP instead of allowing me to handle the upload directly with PHP. This makes me mildly psychotic, but hey, the money man calls the shots.

Since I have no way of detecting the completion of those FTP uploads, I set him up with a special FTP account that is rooted into the uploads directory, and designed an interface that monitors that folder and allows him to start transcoding those files for web at his discretion. This is less than optimal. I'd like to show the progress of currently processing uploads on my mobile app, and hopefully start encoding files automatically when the FTP transfer completes.

So what I'm really asking for is either a method of detecting that a file is still being uploaded, or some way of finding the size of the original file that is being uploaded so that I can do comparisons.

Thanks!

Answer 1

In case anyone else is ever wondering, the answer to the question reached through the comments and more research on my end to confirm, is that the total size of a file is not passed to the server at all during ftp transfers. Thanks to Jonathan Amend.

Answer 2

On Linux, you can use fuser to see if a file's in use by a process. A more reliable option would be to use the inotify system, which'll give you realtime notifications of file change events.